


A Time to Yield

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Gen, Sentinel Thursday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 15:49:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8806909
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: There was only one thing Blair could do...





	

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Sentinel Thursday prompt 'yield'

A Time to Yield

by Bluewolf

_To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield._

Blair read the words, trying to find once again the hope and optimism they had engendered in his juvenile mind when he first read the poem twenty years previously.

Useless.

He had searched for so long to find a sentinel. He had _found_ a sentinel - a full sentinel, not just a part sentinel with only two or three senses heightened (though he had found plenty of those). He had spent several years working with his sentinel.

More than once he had felt like giving up, when life with Jim Ellison had proved to be more than difficult, but there was in him a stubborn streak that wouldn't allow him to abandon the task he had undertaken - to help his sentinel, to be a companion to him, to help him control his sometimes erratic senses.

He had had proof more than once that Jim did like him, did appreciate the help he gave...

But this. This total refusal by Jim to accept that what had happened was not Blair's fault... It was too much. And yet... It was up to Blair to put things right. To try to put things right. Because ultimately the mistake made was his - what the cops would have called 'a rookie mistake'.

Blair had used Jim's real name in the first draft of his dissertation.

That he had planned to remove it when he went over the thing, revising it, counted for nothing... although he knew a touch of wry amusement as he thought how frustrated the media would have been if they had searched Cascade for - say - Theodore Garfield. Well, they might have found a Theodore Garfield, right enough, though it wouldn't have helped them find 'The Sentinel'.

There was just one thing he could do to try to give Jim his life back...

***

"... My thesis 'The Sentinel' is a fraud."

It broke his heart to deny Jim's abilities, but it had to be done. He had to yield, to surrender his wishes, give up everything he had worked nearly half his life for, in order to protect Jim.

Knowing what would happen afterwards, he had already cleared out his office at Rainier; everything from it that was his was in boxes in the trunk of his car. He then drove to the PD.

There wasn't much there that was his; just one or two things in a drawer in Jim's desk. He would retrieve those and leave his observer's badge on Simon's desk. Yes, Simon knew the truth, but there was no way Simon would be allowed, now, to keep Blair riding along on a four-year-expired pass, and he could at least spare Simon the embarrassment of telling him he had to go.

It wouldn't take him long to pack up everything he had in the loft, either. He knew that Jim was visiting Simon that afternoon; he could be away before Jim got home, and spare himself the hurt of hearing Jim telling him to go.

Maybe he shouldn't have gone back to the loft after they got back from Sierra Verde... but at that point he had still been reluctant to yield, to admit that possibly Tennyson's Ulysses had got it wrong. To admit that in fact one could strive, seek and find... but that ultimately there was a time to let go, and accept that yielding to the Fates was all one could do.

***

But at the PD he found that he was wrong. He found that he was still welcome; and that Jim did still want him as companion and guide.

He had strived, sought and found... and he did not have to yield.


End file.
